Description

Care is central to life, and yet is all too often undervalued, taken for granted, and hidden from view. This collection of fourteen substantive and highly innovative essays, along with its insightful introduction, seeks to explore the different dimensions of care that shape social, legal and political contexts. It addresses these dimensions in four key ways. First, the contributions expand contemporary theoretical understandings of the value of care, by reflecting upon established conceptual approaches (such as the ‘ethics of care’) and developing new ways of using and understanding this concept. Second, the chapters draw on a wide range of methods, from doctrinal scholarship through ethnographic, empirical and biographical research methodologies. Third, the book enlarges the usual subjects of care research, by expanding its analysis beyond the more typical focus on familial interconnection to include professional care contexts, care by strangers and care for and about animals. Finally, the collection draws on contributions from academics working in Europe and Australia, across law, anthropology, gender studies, politics, psychology and sociology. By highlighting the points of connection and tension between these diverse international and disciplinary perspectives, this book outlines a new and nuanced approach to care, exploring contemporary understandings of care across law, the social sciences and humanities.

Table of Contents

1. ReValuing Care: Cycles and Connections, Rosie Harding, Ruth Fletcher & Chris Beasley 2. Negotiating Strangeness on the Abortion Trail, Ruth Fletcher 3. Carrying On by Caring With in the Shadow of a South African HIV/AIDS Global Health Intervention, Abigail Baim-Lance 4. Caring for the Homeless: Westminster City Council and anti-homeless bye-laws, Caroline Hunter 5. Paths to Social Caring: Researchers consider their journeys to activism, Jenny Baker, Margaret Allen & Maureen Dyer 6. Young People who Care for a Family Member with Physical or Mental Health Problems: Can research better reflect the interests of young carers?, Lester Watson 7. Caring at the Borders of the Human: Companion animals and the homeless, Helen Carr 8. Care and Relationality: Supported decision-making under the UN CRPD, Rosie Harding 9. ‘New Fathers’ and the Right to Parental Leave: Is the European Court of Human Rights satisfied with just breadwinning?, Alice Margaria 10. Carers as Legal Subjects, Ann Stewart 11. Towards a ‘Reasonable’ Level of State Support for Care? Constitutionalism, care work and the common good, Olivia Smith 12. Terms of Endearment: Meanings of family in a diverse sample of Australian parents, Clare Bartholomaeus & Damien W. Riggs 13. "It has had quite a lot of reverberations through the family": Reconfiguring relationships through parent with dementia care, Elizabeth Peel 14. "Institutions, they’re very straight. My god I hope I don’t have to go into a care home": Spatial inequalities anticipated by older lesbians and gay men, Sue Westwood 15. Beyond Care and Vocabularies of Altruism: Considering sexuality and older people, Chris Beasley

About the Editors

Rosie Harding is a Professor of Law and Society at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Ruth Fletcher is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Law at the School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, UK.

Chris Beasley is Professor of Politics at the School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, Australia.

About the Series

Within a broad geopolitical and intellectual landscape, this new, theoretically engaged, interdisciplinary series explores institutional and grassroots practices of social justice across a range of spatial scales. While the pursuit of social justice is as important as it has ever been, its character, conditions, values, and means of advancement are being radically questioned and rethought in the light of contemporary challenges and choices. Attuned to these varied and evolving contexts, Social Justice explores the complex conditions social justice politics confronts and inhabits – of crisis, shock, and erosion, as well as renewal and social invention, of change as well as continuity.

Foregrounding struggle, imagined alternatives and the embedding of new norms, the Social Justice series welcomes books which critically and normatively address the values underpinning new social politics, everyday forms of embodied practice, new dissident knowledges, and struggles to institutionalise change. In particular, the series seeks to explore state and non-state forms of organisation, analysing the different pathways through which social justice projects are put into practice, and the contests their practice generates. More generally, submissions are welcomed exploring the following themes:

• The changing politics of equality and social justice

• The establishment of alternative, organised sites and networks through which social and political experimentation take place

• The phenomenology of power, inequality and changing social relations

• Techniques of governance through which social change and equality agendas are advanced and institutionalised across different geographic scales

• Institutionalisation of new norms (through official and unofficial forms of institutionalisation) and struggles over them

• Changing values, practices, and the ways in which relations of inequality and difference are understood

Social Justice is intended as a critical interdisciplinary series, at the interface of law, social theory, politics and cultural studies. The series welcomes proposals that advance theoretical discussion about social justice, power, institutions, grass-roots practice and values/ ethics. Seeking to develop new conversations across different disciplines and fields, and working with wide-ranging methodologies, Social Justice seeks contributions that are open, engaging, and which speak to a wide, diverse academic audience across all areas of the law, social sciences and humanities.

For further information on the series, or to discuss a possible contribution, please contact the Series Editors at: